Arrogance Defined: Goldman Sachs

June 9, 2010

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Here’s Karl Denninger’s thoughts on Goldman Sachs’s data dump on the FCIC.

Arrogance Defined: Goldman Sachs

JAKARTA, INDONESIA - JANUARY 27: Eight-year-old Basir (R), helps his sister Ning (L) to climb the mountain of rubbish where they will collect plastic, at the Bantar Gebang landfill site, one of Jakarta's biggest dump sites, on January 27, 2010 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Children who live and work at the landfill site are schooled by day before going to help their parents scavange and sell their finds after classes are over. Around 6,000 metric tons of garbage are dumped daily at the landfill site, and can contiue to be following the renewal of the site's contract last year for a further 20 years. (Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images)

Will someone just break these bastards up – or close them down?

“We did not ask them to pull up a dump truck to our offices and dump a bunch of rubbish,” said Angelides, 56, who previously served as California’s treasurer. “This has been a very deliberate effort over time to run out the clock.”

I wonder if there’s an obstruction charge in here somewhere.

Another source says that Goldman dumped five terabytes of data on the FCIC. To put this in perspective that’s something on the order of five hundred full-length DVD movies. That sort of "data dump" is clearly intended to obstruct investigation and is the sort of tactic sometimes employed in civil litigation when one is trying to prevent the actual discernment of something important by burying it under 100 tons of what amount to chatter over whether the janitor was banging one of the secretaries.

This is the sort of arrogance that I find flatly unacceptable – and so should both Congress and others. It appears the FCIC does, which is a good thing. It also appears that Goldman badly miscalculated in their belief they could pull this crap and get away with it.

Goldman has a many-year history of simply pissing on people who claim to come to them with regulatory requirements. Remember, it was Henry Paulson, then their chief, who came to the SEC and "asked" for the leverage limits that formerly bound them to be removed. When he was told "no" in 2000, he waited a bit and came back in 2004, and this time got what he asked for.

After this he was "rewarded" with the Treasury Secretary position.

Both Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers failed with leverage more than double the former legal limits – limits they could not have exceeded but for Henry Paulson’s "request."

Put another way, neither of those firms would have failed but for Paulson’s act.

That puts a bit of a different color on the financial mess, doesn’t it?

Perhaps the FCIC will examine that factor in the lead-up to the explosion in our financial markets that began in 2007…..